


Détente

by coalitiongirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: 5a, F/F, Swan-Mills Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 00:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4982296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Clear your place, dear,” Regina says, not missing a beat. Have they always been this in sync? The months before the Chernabog, certainly. Emma’s heart is still doing that frustrating twisty thing that means that she’s getting along too well with Regina. “Emma, if you throw heavy furniture at our son again, you won’t be invited back.” </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After the Jolly Roger visit in 5.03, Dark Swan goes to family dinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Détente

**Author's Note:**

> I really just wanted to give Dark Swan a hug, honestly. Also possibly let her crush my heart. This kind of has one of those. 
> 
> Mostly unedited, but I wanted it out as soon as possible. Hope you enjoy! :)

She wants to storm out and…start a fire, maybe. Turn someone to stone. Make someone  _suffer_ and hurt for the way that she’d just been treated like vile garbage and cast aside. She doesn’t know what this is, if it’s heartbreak or fury or both, but she does know that she’d expect it from–

From herself. Not from  _him_. What the fuck had she done to him to be so handily denounced as unworthy?

She’d sold her soul to be this way, endured the demands to be  _good_ and  _right_ and  _pure_. She’d gone through all of it until the final betrayals and now her own supposed true love has rejected her because she isn’t his lily-white savior anymore?  _Fuck this, I’m going to murder someone_.

With her departure from the Jolly Roger comes clarity, though, and Emma stores the sword she’d taken from it and stalks through the streets instead, heading toward nowhere at all. It shouldn’t work like this. She shouldn’t be lonely and melancholy now that she’s free. She shouldn’t–

She’s the Dark One. She’s unstoppable, she’s deadly, and she’s…standing outside of her son’s home, craning her neck to see into the windows where he’s curled up on the couch, reading a book with Regina’s head on his shoulder. Regina who’d survived her last attack, and Regina who still manages to twist at her heart when Emma peers at her.

She’s so tired of all these pesky  _feelings_.

She stalks to the door, a smirk on her face as she raps on it. They’ll have a throwdown. Emma will hurl Regina against a marble pillar and watch her bleed and she’ll laugh while she does it. A nice night of violence that will at least let them all know the threat that she–

“Emma,” Regina says, opening the door. She watches her with exhaustion and weariness and a bone-deep sadness that makes Emma want to scream. “What now?”

It’s her cue to start punching, and she musters up a cool smile, “I thought we should have a chat,” before Henry is hovering behind Regina, white-faced and fearful.

“Mom,” he says, eyes wide. “Mom, please don’t hurt anyone else.” His lip is quivering and he’s looking at her like she isn’t his hero anymore and even Rumple had loved Neal, right? This is still something she can salvage and keep close to her.

She shifts in place, the smile vanishing from her face, and Regina stares from Henry to Emma with a pained indecisiveness on her face before she says, “Dinner, then?”

Dark Swan is caught by surprise. “ _What_?”

“I’m not going to leave you alone with him,” Regina points out. “And I know you’ll come after him if I turn you away. So. Dinner?” Her eyes are still hostile, but there’s a familiar heartbreak within them. How long ago had it been that Regina had stood in this doorway and sent Henry away with David?

Regina might understand, and with that realization comes the lurking need to manipulate, to use this new potential faith in her until Regina is exhausted of any affection for Emma Swan (something within her thinks of Regina’s  _You’re better than this_ and cries  _no, no,_ but she’s been quieting that part of her for far longer than she’d been the Dark One).

But she’s so tired of using people who hate her and Regina doesn’t look at her like she’s disgusted. Regina insists there’s still good in her, and as laughable an idea as that is, Emma craves it still. “Dinner,” she says, and follows Regina inside.

Regina says, “You have all this dark magic. Maybe you can scrape the bottom of the roux saucepan clean,” and Emma laughs a real laugh that terrifies her. Trusting Regina leads to misery and her downfall. Trusting Regina leads to empty promises and hopeless love and–

She’d bared her soul to Hook earlier today, but she still feels more vulnerable in this bright kitchen where she’s scrubbing a pot and Henry is maneuvering past her to get to the silverware and Regina is keeping a watchful eye on her but still manages to cut four potatoes into perfectly even slices.

“So, how was your day?” Regina asks Henry, her eyes still sharp on Emma.

“It was good!” Henry says, and immediately blushes. They both turn to stare at him, eyes narrowing in tandem. “I mean. It was fine. I went to school and hung out with some of the cool Camelot people–“

“Which cool Camelot people?” Emma demands, hands nearly incinerating Regina’s dining room table. But she alone remembers– “You met Violet again, didn’t you?”

“A girl,” Regina repeats, glowering at Emma as though this is  _her_ fault. “He met a  _girl_ in Camelot?”

“I didn’t okay it!” Emma protests. “You were the one so distracted by your–“ She bites off the sentence before she can give anything else away, honing back in on Henry. Regina seems to have given up on staring down Emma to focus on this new twist. “Henry, you’re a  _child_.”

“I’m fourteen!”

“Right.” Regina nods in satisfaction. “A child. I want to meet this girl.”

“No way. No, I’m not introducing any girls to you two.” Henry shudders.

Emma leans forward. “I know who she is,” she threatens. “I could rip apart–“ Regina clears her throat loudly and Emma amends, “Find her and not do…anything too deadly to her.” She smiles with her mouth and knows her eyes look like murder and Henry scowls at her, unimpressed.

“I’m going to my room,” he announces, stomping toward the doorway.

A china closet slides across the room to block his exit. Emma twitches her fingers, scolding the rush within her as Henry jumps backward. “Mom!”

“Clear your place, dear,” Regina says, not missing a beat. Have they always been this in sync? The months before the Chernabog, certainly. Emma’s heart is still doing that frustrating twisty thing that means that she’s getting along too well with Regina. “Emma, if you throw heavy furniture at our son again, you won’t be invited back.”

“I could just snap your neck and take over this house,” Emma grumbles.

Regina gives her a hard look. “I saw how dusty your little dollhouse was. You couldn’t manage a house this size.”

It’s familiar and it’s alien at once, the rage and the affection that rush through her at once, battle after battle ensuring that no war is won. She won’t kill Regina tonight. She can use the ease with which Henry’s presence had maneuvered Regina into accepting her, how easily they’d fallen back into their roles as  _Mom and Mom_ , how quickly Regina had been willing to believe that she’d behave–

She has so much to  _use_ , and somehow none of it is relevant when Regina says, “And how was your day, Emma?” in a challenging tone.

“Oh, you know. Terrorized some dwarves, murdered some innocents–“ She delights in seeing Regina’s face harden at that. “Had Killian tell me that he doesn’t love me anymore now that I’m  _this_ –“ Her muscles twitch into a sneer and her eyes aren’t matching her face again, are sabotaging this attempt to laugh off the whole business, and Regina’s face  _softens._

 _Softens_. As though Emma’s still that awkward puppy-faced savior with a deep desire to please her. Emma snarls at her when she reaches for her, rises and stalks through the room in long steps so Regina can’t come close. “Don’t give me that bullshit about seeing the real Emma in me again. I’m still Emma. I’m just–“

“Free,” Regina says, eyeing her speculatively. “That’s what I used to think, too.”

“Stop trying to psychoanalyze me!” Emma hisses. “Stop trying to pretend you understand anything about me anymore. The Evil Queen has  _nothing_ on the Dark one, and–“ She storms forward and seizes Regina’s face in her hands, yanks her up with her chin raised and her eyes still so, so sad, and she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. Kill. Maim. Kiss.

 _Kiss?_ She drops Regina’s chin and squeezes her fists together, and Regina slumps against her, hands coming up around Emma’s back to hold herself steady. It’s– it’s almost like a hug. Emma shakes, feeling too much and not enough and every inch of her skin prickling with fire, and Regina straightens, lays her head against Emma’s shoulder, waits.

“I could kill you,” Emma whispers, low enough that Henry can’t hear even if he’s eavesdropping. “I could pluck out your heart right now and crush it.”

“You could try,” Regina retorts. “But, well, your last murder attempt didn’t work. And for all your talk about how evil and unleashed you are, I don’t think you would ever try to kill me directly.”

Emma seethes, furious and longing and furious at herself for longing. She shouldn’t have come here. She’d been off-kilter to begin with and now she’s even more confused, even more uncertain of what she wants.  _Henry. Regina._

“I have a question for you,” she says, disappearing and reappearing across the room. She’s out of Regina’s embrace, free to glare at her without terrible emotions coming to play. And she echoes her question to Killian, danger in her every silky syllable. “Do you love me?”

Regina laughs and Emma jolts backward, rage seeping through her throat to leave a bitter taste in her mouth. “Emma,” Regina says, shaking her head. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

If she hadn’t been the Dark One, she might have stuttered. As it is, she can feel words sticking in her throat. “What?”

“A bouquet of flowers,” Regina says, spreading her hands. “Some chocolate. The still-beating hearts of every dwarf in Snow’s entourage. I’m a queen. I expect to be courted.” There’s a tilt to her lips that might be a smile, an invitation and a vulnerability and an answer without an answer.

She’s been here before, easy banter as they clear the table and shamelessly flirt with the idea of being  _something_. She’d been with Killian and Regina had been hung up on that walking tree and they’d never done anything with it, nothing but a few drunken kisses and that time she’d stuck her hand up Regina’s blouse and promptly fallen asleep.

That time has passed. Emma isn’t that person anymore. Emma doesn’t  _want_ to be that person anymore, no matter how brightly Regina’s eyes shine and how that glow of  _something_ still lights up her eyes. No matter how even the rage within her has been quieted for one simple night.

She’s losing the script. She’s so close, and she’s losing the script. Regina is drawing closer, her face bare of the wariness that had lined it before, and she whispers, “I suppose you did do the dishes,” teasingly and leans in.

And Emma wants it so badly in that moment that she’s terrified of what would happen if Regina Mills’s lips touch hers.

She vanishes in a puff of black smoke, the ghost of a kiss still lingering on her lips.

 


End file.
